TexasScholarWorks
    • Login
    • Submit
    View Item 
    •   Repository Home
    • UT Communities
    • The Kay Bailey Hutchison Center for Energy, Law, and Business
    • KBH Energy Center Research and Publications
    • View Item
    • Repository Home
    • UT Communities
    • The Kay Bailey Hutchison Center for Energy, Law, and Business
    • KBH Energy Center Research and Publications
    • View Item
    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

    Ideology vs. Interest Group Politics in U.S. Energy Policy

    Thumbnail
    View/Open
    ba77b5_5d191760e6774a9fb56071ca38653171.pdf (708.9Kb)
    Date
    2017-03-27
    Author
    Spence, David B.
    Adelman, David E.
    Share
     Facebook
     Twitter
     LinkedIn
    Metadata
    Show full item record
    Department
    The Kay Bailey Hutchison Center for Energy, Law, and Business
    Description
    The political economy of energy policy in the United States is dominated by a combination of ideological partisanship and interest group lobbying. Both are reflected in the widespread belief that, under the Obama administration, the Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) was engaged in a misguided “war on coal,” despite the coal industry’s status as the leading industrial source of air pollution and compelling evidence that the benefits of EPA’s regulations vastly exceed their costs. This conflict is persistent and unresolved, notwithstanding repeated involvement of the Supreme Court over the last few years. The politics of this conflict are compounded by tensions between electricity managers and environmental regulators. Much of this tension is driven by competing perspectives: EPA’s focus has been on the national costs and benefits of its rules, whereas grid managers operate regionally. This Article resolves the apparent conflicts by downscaling the regulatory analyses of three highprofile (and highly litigated) EPA rules addressing emissions of conventional pollutants, air toxics, and greenhouse gases associated with climate change from coal-fired power plants. This Article utilizes complementary EPA databases and draws on several model estimates to examine the regional impacts— both costs and benefits—of regulations targeting coal-fired power plants. Overall, this Article finds that the distribution of both the compliance costs and environmental benefits of the rules are roughly commensurate with each region’s reliance on coal-fired power plants, particularly older facilities. That is, the benefits of reducing emissions under these rules are predominantly local. As a consequence, regulatory benefits exceed costs not only at the national level but at the regional level as well, and typically by large margins. Further, with a few important caveats, we find that while the EPA rules will hasten power plant closures, most will occur in electricity markets that have sufficient excess capacity to mitigate potential threats to electricity supplies and reliability. Nevertheless, opposition to the rules persists, which we explain as the product of a combination of both interest group and ideological/partisan opposition. Interestingly, ideological/ partisan opposition appears to hold greater sway based on varying levels of political opposition regionally and may— incrementally—be shifting in EPA’s favor.
    Subject
    Energy
    air pollution
    air toxics
    Climate change
    coal-fired power plants
    compliance costs
    conventional pollutants
    Electricity
    electricity supplies
    emissions
    environmental
    environmental benefits
    Environmental Protection Agency
    EPA
    EPA rules
    Greenhouse gases
    ideological partisanship
    Ideology
    interest group lobbying
    Interest Group Politics
    Obama Administration
    political economy
    regulation
    rules
    Supreme Court
    war on coal
    U.S. energy policy
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/2152/61537
    Collections
    • KBH Energy Center Research and Publications

    University of Texas at Austin Libraries
    • facebook
    • twitter
    • instagram
    • youtube
    • CONTACT US
    • MAPS & DIRECTIONS
    • JOB OPPORTUNITIES
    • UT Austin Home
    • Emergency Information
    • Site Policies
    • Web Accessibility Policy
    • Web Privacy Policy
    • Adobe Reader
    Subscribe to our NewsletterGive to the Libraries

    © The University of Texas at Austin

     

     

    Browse

    Entire RepositoryCommunities & CollectionsDate IssuedAuthorsTitlesSubjectsDepartmentsThis CollectionDate IssuedAuthorsTitlesSubjectsDepartments

    My Account

    Login

    Statistics

    View Usage Statistics

    Information

    About Contact Policies Getting Started Glossary Help FAQs

    University of Texas at Austin Libraries
    • facebook
    • twitter
    • instagram
    • youtube
    • CONTACT US
    • MAPS & DIRECTIONS
    • JOB OPPORTUNITIES
    • UT Austin Home
    • Emergency Information
    • Site Policies
    • Web Accessibility Policy
    • Web Privacy Policy
    • Adobe Reader
    Subscribe to our NewsletterGive to the Libraries

    © The University of Texas at Austin